The Emancipator's Wife (38 page)

Now and then Mary would be invited to the handsome house Stephen Douglas and his wife had taken—with his father-in-law's money, she suspected—but few Washington ladies returned Mary's calls. It didn't seem to matter that so many of them—including the doyenne of them all, Dolley Madison—were connected in one way or another with the Parker/Todd clan. Mary left cards on everyone, from Mrs. Polk and the wife of the wealthy banker William Corcoran, on down to the Congressional wives in other boardinghouses. Although she knew that, naturally, one's own scope for entertaining in a boardinghouse parlor was sorely limited, she expected invitations, or at least the courtesy of returned visits.

But everyone seemed to be so busy laying cards on the tables of the great themselves that there was no time to so much as drive by—or send a servant by—Mrs. Spriggs's. Those who did visit, she gathered almost at once, were the wives of junior Congressmen, like herself, without power or influence. It would not do to be seen too often with them.

And indeed, with Bobby and Eddie to look after most days—and most nights, while Lincoln was out in informal after-session colloquies with his male colleagues in eating-houses, taverns, or other boardinghouse “messes,” as they were called—Mary would have been hard-pressed to respond to an invitation from even Dolley Madison herself. She'd see the famous hostesses drive by in their carriages on the icy streets, or in the Capitol rotunda on those days when she could bribe Ann Spriggs to look after the boys so she could sit in the galleries with the most astonishing mélange of Congressional wives, town prostitutes, men-about-town, and what appeared to be half the colored population of Washington, slave and free, to listen to the debates. Like every other Congressional wife, Mary learned to recognize Dolley Madison, in her stylish gowns with her paint and powder fighting a rear-guard action against the years, or her queenly young niece Adele Cutts; heard the admiring whispers as people pointed out the Blair ladies—almost royalty in Maryland—or William Corcoran's wife Hannah.

Mary thoroughly enjoyed those rare visits to the Capitol itself, its lobby like a fair with journalists, spectators,
nymphes du pavé,
hawkers of hothouse oranges, and candidates for government pensions or government jobs lying in wait to ambush their Congressman the moment he put his head out the Chamber door. The United States had captured Mexico City, and terms of peace were being wrangled. Already abolitionists like Giddings were beginning to protest that slavery must not be allowed to spread. The atmosphere of power, influence, and rumor that tingled in the hallways and galleries filled her with delight and a sense of her own importance, and she reveled in writing knowingly to Elizabeth and
Ninian,
They're all saying at the Capitol . . .

One of her greatest triumphs was the evening when Lincoln brought John Quincy Adams to dinner at Mrs. Spriggs's “mess.” The former
President's wife entertained very little in the house they rented on Thirteenth Street. “Mrs. Adams has never quite gotten over the degradation of my choice to serve in Congress, after being President of the land,” remarked the old gentleman, with a dry glance at Lincoln under his shelving white brow. “I cannot induce her to see that no man is degraded by seeking service in the government of his country—or in being elected as selectman of his hometown, for that matter.”

Adams spoke in French to Mary, of Paris in the days before the
Revolution, and of London and St. Petersburg in its wake. Mary recalled what Henry Clay had told her father about cold, stuffy, reserved, and charmless Adams: that he was like a very dry wine, that repels on first mouthful and only reveals its complexity to the thoughtful.

She made sure to include the quote in her next letter.

But most days, she spent alone in the boardinghouse room. The damp climate went to Eddie's chest, and the little boy was often sickly. Bobby, forced to remain indoors, was bored, noisy, and sullen, and Mrs. Spriggs referred to both boys as “those tiresome apes.” By Bobby's increasing silence, and unwillingness to play with the few local boys he encountered, Mary suspected that the local boys called him “Cock-Eye,” as a few of the Springfield children had.

Lincoln, as usual, was preoccupied. Though Mary tried to be patient, a good partner to him in his responsibilities, his habitual abstraction sparked stormy quarrels: “I'm here to do a job of work, not play dry-nurse to the boys!” he flared at her on one sleety Sunday afternoon, and Mary shot back with, “We'd be able to get Mrs. Spriggs to watch them more often if you'd act like a father and teach them a little discipline!” Lincoln went silent after that, and when Mary flung herself down on the bed in tears, he took Bobby and Eddie for a walk despite the cold. They came back just before dark, all three spattered from head to foot with mud and full of tales of seeing the war-hero Jefferson Davis's new towncarriage, driving up to the White House gates.

Just before Christmas, Lincoln enraged most of Congress with a resolution condemning the war with Mexico. Despite this, he confided to Mary, on one of the rare evenings that they spent reading in the warm downstairs parlor while the boys played at the hearth, he was being asked by other Whigs in Congress to support General Zachary Taylor for President.

“It'll mean a speaking tour, after Congress shuts up shop in summer,” he told her, a little apologetically. “Through New England, they say. Now, you can go on back to Springfield with the boys, Molly—I'm sure Washburne would be glad to escort you....”

“If you
dare
to go traveling through New England without me, Mr. Lincoln,” said Mary, lowering her novel and regarding him with sparkling eyes, “after
martyring
myself in this
dreadful
city all winter, you'll come home to find the doors locked against you and all your clothes in a cardboard box on the porch.”

Mrs. Penfold, the literal-minded and evangelistic lady who had the room next to theirs upstairs, looked up from her knitting, shocked. But Lincoln merely smiled and said, with deep satisfaction, “That's my Molly.”

Eddie had a cold again after Christmas, and another in February.
Lincoln would come in from sessions of the House, or meetings of the Postal Committee—to which he'd been appointed apparently on the grounds of his year's stint as postmaster of the village of New Salem—and would sit up nights with the feverish toddler so that Mary could get some sleep. Waking from a troubled doze—she seldom actually slept even when she could—Mary would see him, sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed with Eddie in his arms, rocking him and making the little rusty growls under his breath that passed, for him, for a lullaby:

“The water is wide, I cannot get o'er,

Nor do I have the wings to fly;

Give me a boat that can carry two,

And we both shall cross, my love and I. . . .”

Had the mother he never spoke of sung him that, she wondered, when he was ill?

He was up all the night, and gone in the morning to meet with
Giddings on a bill to outlaw slavery within the District of Columbia, after going down to the yard in his shirtsleeves to chop kindling to keep Mrs. Spriggs sweet. So there passed another day, Mary reflected despairingly, that they couldn't make calls or set up connections, and that she would have no adult conversation and no time to read. How anyone could get along with Mrs. Spriggs she couldn't imagine, but Lincoln would do errands for her, and sweet-talk her out of extra firewood—for which she usually charged five cents extra, or ten if she had to cut kindling—or boiling water for poultices and tisanes.

Eddie was on the mend—and getting fractious—when Lincoln came in, late that night, with the news that John Quincy Adams had been felled by a stroke during the session, and was not expected to live. “The poor old gentleman!” exclaimed Mary, sitting on the edge of the trundle-bed. She'd been trying to get Eddie to eat, but the child refused the porridge that was the only thing Mrs. Spriggs would cook for him.

“He had an apoplexy not long ago, and got over it,” replied Lincoln, sitting on the other side of Eddie on the bed, with his big hands hanging down between his knees. Bobby, who'd been underfoot all day, ran to his father's side to be taken up on his knee. Lincoln hugged him, but absently, his mind still on the picture of that white-haired old gentleman toppling from his chair to the House floor, gasping for air. “They carried him into the Speaker's room, and there set up a cot; Douglas went to fetch a doctor. They say he'll stay there till he's fit to be moved, but myself, I think he'll end his life in the place where he spent it, in the house of service to his country. And that is not such a bad way to end,” he added softly.

He sat silent, gazing into the shadows. How long he might have remained thus, oblivious to his surroundings, Mary didn't know; she'd seen him lost in one of his moods for hours. But Eddie seized the porridge-spoon from the bowl and whacked his father on the arm with it, leaving a long sticky smear. And, when Lincoln made no response whatsoever, piped up, “Papa,
nasty
!”

Mary pulled the spoon from him. Lincoln, roused from his thoughts, looked down at the boy, amusement flickering in his eyes: “I should say it is nasty, son—and you're bound to spread the nasty around until something gets done about it, aren't you?”

As Mary darted to the water-pitcher for a rag—her husband was perfectly capable of going into a debate on the floor of Congress with a smear of oatmeal on his sleeve—Bobby said, “Mama told Mrs. Spriggs to make Eddie a blancmange and Mrs. Spriggs said—”

“Never mind what Mrs. Spriggs said,” snapped Mary, tears constricting her throat again at the recollection of that bitter exchange of personalities. Her head throbbed, with hunger as much as anything else, for in the wake of the quarrel with the landlady she'd been too exhausted to
go down to supper. “Mr. Lincoln, that woman is impossible! I merely asked—a most
reasonable
request—that she make a blancmange for Eddie, or permit me the use of her kitchen to make one myself. In a most
disagreeable
voice she informed me that she could not spare the maid to help me or to go out for the almonds, of which she
said
she had none in the house. Though how any woman calling herself a cook could be without them . . .” She caught herself up, hearing her voice growing shrill. In the calmest tone she could, she added firmly, “We simply must find another place to live.”

The light of the single lamp on the bedside table picked out the surge of jaw-muscle as Lincoln clenched his teeth. Resentment flooded through her, anger not only at the petty and avaricious Mrs. Spriggs, but the chewed-over details of the quarrel that she'd been waiting until nearly nine o'clock at night to present to her errant husband.

At the same time she saw his eyes travel to her—her hair loosened from its pins with Eddie's fitful pulling, the oatmeal-stains on her own dress and shawl, her eyes swollen with tears and headache. And past her, to the room, stuffy, cluttered with the boys' things, smelling faintly of mildew and chamber pots, two cans of the morning's wash-water still not carried out and a huge damp stain on the rug where a third can had been overturned by Bobby. The day had been rainy and Bobby bored to distraction and petulant. Mrs. Spriggs and her own husband were the only adults she had spoken to since she'd waked that morning.

Her eyes burned again and she felt the frustration blossom in her, turning her sick.

Very gently—in the same voice he'd used to try to conciliate her in her quarrels with his cousin Hetty Hanks—Lincoln said, “Mother, the town is as full as it can hold, with Congress sitting. But I will look—”

“When?”
retorted Mary bitterly. “If you can't even come in time for supper, or to spend an hour with your wife and sons . . .” That hurt him—she saw him flinch like a man struck by an arrow—and felt a hateful spurt of pleasure that she'd at least gotten his attention. Did he realize that while he was politicking with his men friends and laying plans to elect Zachary Taylor President—on God knew what platform, since the man had no opinions on anything that Mary had ever read!—his wife was cooped up in a twelve-by-fourteen room with two squalling children, waiting for a word with him?

“I'm going back to Lexington,” she said.

Lincoln's eyes widened, stricken, but he said nothing.

“I'm writing to my father tomorrow. You don't care if I'm here or not....”

“Now, Molly, that's not true....”

“It is,” she cried hotly, “and you know it is.” The instant guilt in his face confirmed her words. Fury blinded her: at the mighty Washington hostesses who had no time for the wife of a mere Representative, at Mrs. Spriggs, at the other boarders who slurped soup through their whiskers or cleaned their ears at the table, at the poverty that would not let them take a house here, that for five years now had reduced her to the status of servant and drudge. Bobby and Eddie, as they generally did during their parents' quarrels, clung closer to Lincoln, making themselves invisible in his bony shadow. “You don't care....”

Trembling, she forced herself to stop, hiccoughed, and stood, fumbling at her skirt pocket for a handkerchief.

Lincoln silently fished a clean one from his coat. Years of living with Mary had taught him to carry them.

She took it from him, feeling surprisingly, suddenly clear in her mind and heart. The poison-pain of resentment dissolved; it was as if a door had opened, in her life and in her mind. The words, flung at him in anger, showed themselves now as an actual solution, and it was as if an iron bond broke from around her chest.

She stretched out her hand, and laid it alongside his face. He looked up at her in surprise that was almost comical.

“You know Eddie hasn't been well,” she said softly. “And poor Bobby is bored frantic, aren't you, darling?”

Bobby regarded her for a moment with those wide-set, mismatched blue eyes, gauging what she wanted him to say. Then he nodded.

Lincoln shut his eyes, drew in his breath, and let it out. Then he looked up at her again, and took her hand between both of his. “You truly don't mind?”